Katie Laur

I went downtown on a recent Friday night to see the Blue Wisp Jazz Club in its new location. When I slipped in at Seventh and Race, leaving the rattle of city life behind me, the band was playing a fresh, lilting take on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Desafinado,” the sensual rhythm of the bossa nova wrapping the listeners in its tenderness, its fluid movements. The sound of Phil deGreg at the piano mingled with the tinkling of glasses and the low murmur of conversation. Candles flickered on the black four-top tables. The place was packed; the joint was jumping.

As best as I can recall, it was the spring of 1979 when my band played a small women’s college near Cumberland Gap, in a tiny town called Pippa Passes. We’d been on the road for a couple of days, stringing together one-nighters in eastern Kentucky. Things were going just fine until, at one stoplight in Hazard where the road was so steep it seemed vertical, the van began to smoke. It billowed dramatically from under the hood, and my heart stopped somewhere in my throat.

In friendship and in art, Phyllis Weston has cultivated masterpieces.

I opened my first letter from Pester Flatt on a winter night in 2004, toward the end of my shift on WNKU’s bluegrass radio show Music From the Hills of Home. Wayne Clyburn, my cohost, and I were in our usual end-of-show rush to get logs signed and CDs re-filed when we noticed the envelope. I opened it and began reading—first to myself, then aloud to our listeners. The writer called himself “Pester Flatt,” a take-off on popular bluegrass singer Lester Flatt. He told me his band’s name (Pester Flatt & the Lefties) was costing them bookings at VFW and American Legion Halls, and he felt a new, fresh band name might lead to “Better Bookings By and By.”

A couple of years before, I had met a landlord named Bill Baum in a small studio apartment on Main Street in Over-the-Rhine, which he was rehabbing all by himself. Bill was a quiet, interesting man with graying hair and a red pick-up truck and all kinds of credibility. The room where we met was simple—nothing except a drum stove and a window air conditioner—and I almost rented it. But I let myself be seduced by a place on Walker Street in Mt. Auburn—a bi-level apartment with glass walls in the bedroom, which was just like living in a tree house.